This Election Year, Polls Show Majority of Voters Support Marijuana Legalization

This Election Year, Polls Show Majority of Voters Support Marijuana Legalization

(Image via Pew Research Center)

This election year has been full of surprises, and full of polls. In the spirit of the season, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll among 1,201 U.S. adults to find out where Americans currently stood on the issue of marijuana legalization.

The results were that 57% of U.S. adults say the use of marijuana should be made legal, while 37% say it should be illegal, across the board.

To quantify these numbers, they’ve broken it up into which segments of the population they questioned by age group: Baby Boomers (ages 52-70), Generation X (ages 36-51), and Millenials (ages 52-70).Unsurprisingly, 71% of the Millenials questioned were in support of legalization, while an almost equal number of Boomers (56%), and GenXers (57%) were in favor of marijuana legalization.

The unanticipated part of this poll is how many Boomers were in favor of legalization, as only 17% were for it back in 1990; which makes this a considerable shift in views in a short amount of time. The same holds true for the GenXers, with only 21% having been in favor of legalization in 1990, increasing by 36% now in 2016.